Niku swallowed up one of the best project-management tools on the market.

When managing projects with specialized software was still a fairly new idea, New York-based ABT was widely acknowledged as a leader in the fledgling field. At the time, "ABT was one of the companies spending the most on development," says TRW Automotive's Dale C. Stockman.

Niku bought ABT in 2000, around the same time rivals such as Lawson Software and Microsoft were also snapping up small vendors to get a bigger foothold in the developing market. "Niku was looking to expand functionality around their project-management tools," says Eastman Chemical's Paul Mitchell, "and seemed to have much more vision" than the competition.

To the erstwhile ABT platform it had inherited, Niku added features to better track project costs, but customers claimed the overall productand its client-server delivery formathad grown rather clunky. TRW Automotive's Stockman, for one, was looking forward to a more intuitive, more easily accessible applicationand the newly Web-based Niku 6 fit the bill.

"The product's gotten better," says Textron Financial's Dave Raspallo, who uses Niku to present statistics quickly and effectively, a task that might otherwise require a host of applications. "Without it, we couldn't have tripled in size, and I couldn't run a steering committee for this size business with this volume and velocity," Raspallo says.

Niku is phasing out what used to be the ABT software. Now, version 6.1 of its project- and portfolio-management software allows users to collect and report information through "portlets,'' which are in effect small intranet portals. Royal Caribbean's Richard Shapiro says the approach reduces his company's reliance on other tools, such as Actuate's business-intelligence software. Shapiro also finds the new version "highly customizable," which allows him to query the database directly, codify best practices and improve his company's own particular planning process.

The software's clunkiness is also disappearing. Doug Goetz of Fox Entertainment says that better organization of elements on screen helps make version 6.1 "much more visually compelling and user friendly." To Heath Daughtrey of Harrah's Entertainment, "6.1 is a quantum leap over 6.0."

That tells customers such as Shapiro that they're "being heard by the right people, not just a sales rep.'' Shapiro says he feels "very comfortable with [his] access to Niku's movers and shakers."

Executives listed here are all users of Niku software. Their willingness to talk has been confirmed by Baseline.

Assistant Editorjoshua_weinberger@ziffdavisenterprise.comAfter being on staff at The New Yorker for five years, Josh later traveled the world, hitting all seven continents in a single year. At Yale University, he majored in American Studies, English, and Theatre Studies.